


What We Talk About When We Talk About

by Anonymous



Category: Real Person Fiction
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-10-21
Updated: 2009-10-21
Packaged: 2017-10-02 13:10:05
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,766
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6699
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What we talk about when we talk about...</p>
            </blockquote>





	What We Talk About When We Talk About

**Author's Note:**

  * For [melusina](https://archiveofourown.org/users/melusina/gifts).



> This one's for [Melusina](http://fabu.livejournal.com); thanks to [Stowaway](http://the_stowaway.livejournal.com) for her beta read.

"Hey," Johnny says, the word coming out as a sigh. The cigarette dangles, unlit, from his lips. The phone is already on speaker, and both his hands are playing with the lighter.

"'Ey," Vanessa says, her voice even softer than his—the children are asleep in the house on her side of the Atlantic, and it's two in the morning there; her voice has ricocheted into the stratosphere, bounced halfway around the world, and now it curls and cuddles into the uncaulked recesses of the houseboat and his heart.

She has trouble sleeping without having him say good night, without him talking her down from the day. It's funny, the ways they fit together: he's restless at dawn, and keeping Lily-Rose from burning her toast, giving Jack his special cereal spoon, makes it easier to soothe the jittery feeling of _today is the day when I am going to be found out_.

She's always been a night cat, prowling through unlit hallways, writing snatches of aching chord progressions by the pilot light in the stove.

"I wish I were home," Johnny says. He is too old for this shit, and today, he feels it.

Vanessa huffs a chuckle through her nose. "No," she says, "you don't. Jack's decided I'm a wicked witch and the mushroom omelette tonight was my latest attempt to poison him dead."

Johnny's lips twitch. "This is not the moment to tell you I did sort of the same thing, I guess?"

"What?"

"Refused to eat anything that wasn't from cans. Six months."

Vanessa doesn't say anything for a long moment. "Johnny."

"Swear to god."

More silence.

Vanessa starts giggling the instant before he would have begun to worry. "Johnny," she repeats, her voice a little breathy. He smiles, hums into the phone, rubs his thumb along the cool side of the lighter. "I wish you were here too," she whispers. He can see her, everyday red lipstick gone smudgey, a loose curl dangling, sleeves of her blue workshirt pushed up, for all that she's in France and he isn't. Her feet are bare, or so he thinks, long toes hooked into the oak rungs of the stools in the kitchen. She has an empty demitasse cradled in her hands, the bright red porcelain still holding traces of warmth from after dinner, and she's watching the second hand on the copper clock face, slim as a sunbeam, move inexorably.

He knows it's a fantasy, but it's a damn nice one. The reality would be better, by a long shot, but he knows not to offer to come home. He's gotten over making reckless, stupid, impulsive gestures. Having lasers punch into your skin and take away your protective coloration will tame that tendency.

"What else did you and the kids do today," he says instead, "besides plot—what is it, not matricide. You know."

"Murder?"

"Cooler way of saying it."

"Johnny, you are forty, and _American_. You are no longer _allowed_ to be cool."

"Remind me why I love you?"

She only laughs again. Oh. Right. "Coloring books, Lily read Jack some fairy tales, played hide-and-seek and dragons, made them clean up the mess they left the kitchen this morning—jam everywhere, there's going to be mice, I'm certain—"

"Oh _god_," Johnny blurts. He's secretly petrified of mice.

"I told you that you didn't want to be here," Vanessa reminds him, and the laughter lurking far down in her throat echoes in her voice. "Et toi, Johnny?"

"Long fuck of a day," he admits. "Hurry up and wait."

Vanessa doesn't say anything.

"I'm tired," he says, and while he's trying not to whine, how successful he is can be debated. "I'm tired, and I miss you, and I have no toothpaste and I hit my head in the stairwell, and I'm trying not to worry about Orlando."

He flicks the lighter, watches the tiny flame for a moment. It snaps shut as the pressure of his finger slackens, and he closes his fist around the narrow column. The silver is cold against his palm and clinks against his rings.

Vanessa doesn't say anything.

He can hear her breathing, and he closes his eyes. Matches her inhale, feel the oxygen soak into his lungs; so weird, to hear her breathing and be unable to wrap his fingers around her wrist and feel the veins under his fingers. "I was having lunch with him today," he says slowly, "in the shady corner, because Becca threatened to skin him alive if he keeps tanning, and you know he has that, that habit. Of talking about six things at once."

Vanessa doesn't say anything.

"And he got a call from his mother last night. His father, the one who's still alive, Colin, had a heart attack. Mild," he adds hastily, "but, you know, heart stopping, bad."

He knows Vanessa knows this. The first crisis they weathered, he and Vanessa, was Vanessa's singing teacher—_Maestro_, she still calls him—collapsing in the street; they got through it, but it wasn't pleasant. He went back to L.A. at one point, got very stoned, and called Kate completely fucking out of his head, and she, thank god, didn't do anything but say, "You can't break my heart and then call me at _nine in the fucking morning_, twat," and hang the phone up.

He thanked her for that when he sobered up.

"So he's fretful about that, but he knows not to talk about shit like that in public, so he's talking about Will Turner, which...he's worked with too many fucking method actors, you know that? He doesn't really, what's the word, separate, differentiate, between him and Will, so talking about the whelp is..." he stops.

"Vanessa?"

She's laughing too hard to say anything.

"Did I just say Orlando's worked with too many method actors?"

After a moment, he starts laughing too.

"Oh, my good christ."

He gets himself under control a minute later, and continues, saying, "So talking about Will and Bootstrap is like talking about him and Colin, in code. Or cipher. Or something."

That's still not quite it, and he puts the lighter, warm now from his skin, his blood, his humanness, on the table. He bites his lip, no longer even noticing the different feel of the gold tooth—you really do get used to anything, and the gold in his mouth (your overbite's worth a king's ransom, Vanessa snickered the first time he had it done) is almost more familiar than enamel now.

Obliquely, that's what it is. Orlando talks about Will so he can talk about himself obliquely.

He's suddenly very aware of the hairs on the back of his neck.

"An' then, he, like, switches gears, or something, starts talking about absolute shit nonsense about Buddhism, ethics, nothingness, absolutes."

He puts the cigarette on top of the lighter, nudging it with his finger to make the shape of the cross. He rolled it well; no tobacco shreds drift across the table. The wind that's always outside the house in France, _le mistral_, the wind of the Provençal poets he's begun to read in the last five years, the wind that cuts through air, clothing, skin to reveal a man's heart, doesn't touch him here, and he misses it.

"Except it isn't shit, he didn't really switch gears, because he's talking about _Will_ like that."

Vanessa doesn't say anything for a long moment.

"I'd swear," she says eventually, and he can tell that she's chewing on a strand of hair, "Will doesn't undergo a religious conversion in Pirates 3."

"What? No, Vanessa—" And then he gets it, starts grinning, starts chuckling, fucking _guffawing_—he's seen Black Hawk Down (all right, he's seen the first thirty minutes), he knows what the shape of Orlando's skull is, and the image of Will Turner, head shaven, in a saffron-colored robe, on the backs of his eyelids (most exclusive screening room in the world), is quite possibly the funniest thing ever. "Vanessa."

"Yes, Johnny?"

"I love you."

"That's nice."

He was mostly asleep, the first time she said _oh, that's nice_, and it wasn't in response to anything. Through his mumble of pleasure at her hair slipping over his shoulders, he had realized dimly that something had shifted in the air around them, and opened his eyes.

But she had pushed his arms up over his head and gripped his wrists in both her hands. He'd groaned, deep in his throat, not even realizing she'd climbed on top of him until her hips were flush with his. "If I let go," she said, mouth still wet with his kisses, "will you stay like this?"

"Yes," he'd gasped, rocking up against her, feeling himself surge against her thigh. "_God_, yes."

"I like when you say yes," she whispered, not releasing her grip. "Say it more." She didn't move, only blinked, and breathed, and watched him.

It was four in the morning, mid-December, and the only light came from the Montmartre streetlamps, at the other end of the street. They hadn't bothered to pull the curtains when they came in and the room was lit in an eerie orange glow, as if the hotel was the projection screen for a loop of stock fire footage. Vanessa's eyes caught the light and her skin seemed gilded.

He sucked in air through his teeth and tried to think, couldn't see past the look in her eyes, the swaying curtain of her hair; it was okay, it was safe, it was _necessary_, to say _yes_ and mean it, to want. "Yes," he said, "God, _yes_, Vanessa, yes."

She smiled, didn't move, didn't say anything.

"Yes," he said again, staring up at her. He sighed, felt the pressure of the mattress against his spine, the damp skin in the small of his back, the hair matted at the back of his head between his skull and the pillowcase, felt something slacken inside him. It wasn't his cock, which still ached, but less insistently, was less important now—the points where her thumbs and fingers pressed against his flesh were far more important.

"When I let go," she said, long moments of silence and breathing later, "you stay there. You stay there because I want you to."

"Yes," he managed to say.

She smiled and lifted her hands. He didn't move.

"Yes," she said, and leaned down and kissed him.

He opens his mouth, now, brushes the backs of his fingers against his lips, knows his legs have sprawled open. His blood is singing _yes_.

He doesn't say anything, and he knows that Vanessa is smiling. Long moments pass, silence, breathing, heartbeats. The world is not made of silicon, carbon, oxygen; it is made of _yes_, and that is how they have made this work for six, seven, eight years (New York, Los Angeles, Paris), nine, ten, eleven time zones (London, St. Vincent, Japan).

_Yes_, he thinks. He says, instead, "And Orlando was talking, about Will." He draws in a breath. "He was saying, that Will. Will starts out a very simple character, a very _normal_ character. Will is a man of absolutes. One absolute. He's in love with Elizabeth."

He looks down at his hands, almost surprised to find the lighter still there between his thumbs. He doesn't pick it up.

"By the end of the first movie, we're sure about that, if nothing else. That absolute is, is, what do you call it, innate. The thing about pirates is something he acquired, at some point. Even if we don't know when. He's willing to part with it, and it doesn't fuck with anything, anything important. Elizabeth. Hell, it makes him closer to that absolute, makes Elizabeth more willing to love him, if he gives up the thing about pirates equals scum of the earth."

Outside, the wind sings, sings of yes, sings of tomorrow, and Johnny knows that it's safe to hope for skin (what was it Orlando had said that one time? Something about skin safe against skin, that's not an Orlando phrase, where had he come up with it) and coffee and wine, a single pearl dangling from a black velvet ribbon, and he hopes that it rains. Hopes that it pours, hopes filming will be held off and that he can stay here and dream of Vanessa naked except for a velvet necklace and holding a smooth coil of rope.

"But?" Vanessa prompts, and her voice disrupts his fantasy. That's okay. The real Vanessa, even one in a different hemisphere, is always preferable.

He scrambles to remember what he was saying. "But. Um. But, he, uh, he—oh, I know."

"Yeah?"

"Hush, you. I know. He—during Pirates 2, he acquires another absolute. He makes that oath to his father." They haven't shot that scene yet, but Orlando's already worrying about it. "And if he has—well, he does. He has two absolutes."

Johnny can see why Orlando's so worried.

"And absolutes...absolutes end up conflicting. Like the old thing about the irresistible force and the immovable object. In a universe where there is the one, the other can't exist by definition."

"Ah," Vanessa says.

"Yeah. He's in love with Elizabeth and he's sworn to save his father, and what happens when those ideas conflict? Not that they do, necessarily, yet, but they could, you know?"

"I know," Vanessa says. Of course she knows.

"And that makes Will, instantly, about a zillion times more complex. Darker. Because he could reject Elizabeth."

Vanessa snorts. It's a rather inelegant sound. "Please," she says. "You're working for _Disney_." He doesn't want to concede that point, so he ignores it loftily.

"Or he could choose Elizabeth," he says, drumming his fingers on the table, "And then what? Where does that leave him?"

Vanessa doesn't say anything. She's read the script. She knows the ending (Rosebud's the sled).

He takes his rings off, one by one, piling them in a little heap. He feels naked, for all that he's wearing jeans and an undershirt. He looks like fuckin' Brando. Coulda been a contenda. How many times, now, has he walked away from being a normal Hollywood player? He's lost track.

But he, himself, is not lost. He knows exactly where he is, tethered to Vanessa, and he's going to stay there. He's going to stay there because she wants him to, and he wants it too.

"And what are your absolutes," Vanessa asks, even though she knows.

"_Les enfants_," he says, speaking in French for a reason he doesn't understand, "_et toi_."

It was one of the first things he really understood when he started really learning French: the difference between _vous_ and _tu_. English only has one word for it: _you_—but there's something important about the distinction. _Vous_ is for anyone; _tu_, and all the attendant variations, is for a lover, a child—an absolute, he thinks now, although he's never put it that way before, and he smiles, involuntarily.

Vanessa is quiet, on the other side of the ocean, and he begins to slip his rings back on. He almost stands, pushes himself up from the chair, goes to look out the window—but he knows sunset's long over, and all he would see is blackness. "Johnny," she says, while his gaze is still fixed vacantly on the wavery reflection of himself in the glass.

He makes a vague sound low in his throat.

"Johnny," she says, and how on earth does she know when his attention has spooled free of her? "You are not a character. You don't have to be dramatically coherent."

What?

"You are just fine without a plot," she says.

Oh.

"If your absolutes don't conflict, fine, you don't have to be tied up—"

"No, but I like it," he says, grinning now that he knows what they've been talking around all this time. He's more awake now than he was half an hour ago, aware of his skin and the soft, wet edges of his mouth. Still tired, but he doesn't want to have the rush of the cigarette anymore; he could, there's no one to object, but he doesn't want it. He wants Vanessa's voice to stitch shut the small rents of worry in his mind, and he wants to tell her nothing but yes, forever.

"Oh, shut up—you don't have to be finished in three acts. You're not a character, you don't have an arc, and it doesn't matter. All right?"

He nods, his throat full of words he doesn't know how to pronounce. "Yes," he says, and it seems to be enough.


End file.
